On walking around through various parks and city streets, I notice the importance of taking one’s time.

We’re often consumed by the need to be connected and now, maybe more so than ever, our connections are only possible through devices.

When you take the time to travel slowly, to linger, to be idle (while socially distant, of course), you have the opportunity to see things you’d otherwise miss. You hear the birdsong. See the leaves billow in the wind. Branches swaying.

There’s no one right way to travel the world. But there are things that are missed when moving too quickly.

Well, damn, I don’t really have much to say about this past week. Left Alaska, and am taking a roundabout journey home. Had to fly to get from Ketchikan to the lower 48, and rather than risk quarantine back home, where someone I know could come in contact with something I may have contracted on the plane, it was better to take my time.

I haven’t seen much. Some snowy mountains outside of Colorado, and some rolling hills. I would have liked to have spent more time in Arizona. It seemed nice passing through.

Not sure what I’ll see or do over the next three weeks, but I’m hoping I’ll have some interesting updates… maybe by next week.

I spent fifty days in the city of Ketchikan during this pandemic. While you could say that I walked a good deal around the island, I feel that I didn’t get to know it. Not really.

A place is more than its geography. It’s about its people and its culture. While I was able to see a little bit of it, much was locked away. Protected from germs, and from my prying eyes.

Travelogues, while proving difficult for me to read in the past, do possess a certain mystique about them – at least for me. In writing my travelogue regarding my nearly two months in Alaska, it would be a lot of routine. Same place, same walks, very people. Occasional trips to resupply at the grocers.

Hopefully, when the pandemic is over and next summer rolls around, I’ll find myself in a much more accomodating environment for exploration and understanding.

It seems that this will be my last Alaskan edition of the Weekly Rundown, at least for the time being. The Coronavirus has effectively canceled my working season, and I will be heading back to the Sunshine State.

So, on my last post from Ketchikan for now, I suppose I’ll talk about why I decided to come here.

Last year I took a cruise to Alaska. We started in Anchorage, several days before the cruise started, and took a glass-topped train up to Denali. It was in seeing Denali that I knew I wanted to come back.

“Whenever a bunch of fellows would get together, someone would start talking about going up north…

Things were pretty much settled to the south of us. We didn’t seem to be ready for steady jobs. It was only natural we’d start talking about the North. We’d bought out the Russians. We’d built canneries up there. The fellows who hadn’t been up was hankering to go. The rest of us was hankering to go back.”

It was mid-June, and at walking around midnight, the sky still had the dusky haze of a setting sun. It was magnificent. And while my body shouted at me that it was tired, my eyes kept insisting it was too early to go to sleep. Hence, most places that far north seem to have blackout curtains.

I’m nowhere near Denali at this moment, Ketchikan being about 1400 km away as the crow flies. But that doesn’t matter, not from the perspective of being here in the Last Frontier.

Mark Adams, in Tip of the Iceberg, writes, “Three basic types of people live in Alaska… There are Native Alaskans, who’ve been there since time immemorial. There are people who have come north running toward something, usually a chance to do something unpleasant to make a lot of money quickly… And there are those who are running away from something.”

Obviously, I don’t belong to that first category. But over the last six weeks, I’ve been wondering which of the latter two types of people I was. A couple of years ago, I would have easily said I was running away from something. But, more recently, it seems that I came north toward something – and that was solely to find myself.

I’ll bid adieu to Alaska again, and I’m pretty certain I’ll be back at some point. Maybe as early as next year…

The Tongass National Forest stretches about 500 miles along the SE Alaska coast covering an area equal in size to Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. It was designated a national forest on September 10, 1907, by proclamation of the President, Teddy Roosevelt.

Tongass is the point of some controversy recently, in the question of whether to allow logging in some of its areas. Today it is home to two national monuments (Misty Fjords and Admiralty Island) and nineteen designated wilderness areas. Which is part of a larger question of ecology vs. economy: how do you decide what’s of value?

Environmentalist (and huge Alaska fan) John Muir noted as he watched federally protected lands across the U.S. come under threat, “Nothing dollarable is safe.” And that is a conundrum that has faced man since the industrial age. What portion of land needs be preserved and what should be developed?

Sitting here, in Southeast Alaska, I’m glad there is still wilderness outside the door. In this country of ours. People from around the world come here in hoards to see Wild Alaska. Not this summer, maybe. But other summers, those in the past. And next summer, I estimate the largest tourist season yet here.